Basically, yes. You will eventually reach a point in your studies where not being familiar with kanji becomes a serious handicap to learning and you likely won't be able to progress without it. Understanding kanji and how it's used in words demystifies a lot of what beginners perceive as randomness/difficulty in Japanese and will make learning easier and more enjoyable.
If it's the number of them to learn that worries you, just focus on learning to write/recognize a few a day and they'll accumulate before you know it. It's a long process, though, so the sooner you commit to it the easier you'll make things for yourself later.
If it's the readings you're worried about, there is an excellent forum post by マイコー (the site admin) called "Kanji: do I really need to learn the onyomi/kunyomi readings?" explaining why they're important and how they help. However, in the beginning when you don't have a lot of vocabulary to apply them to, the readings tend to seem very arbitrary and difficult to remember. If they're frustrating you and don't seem helpful at this stage, then it's fine to focus just on what they mean until you build up a bigger kanji vocabulary -- on Renshuu you can control this in your kanji schedule settings by toggling the "meaning" vector on and the "onyomi/kunyomi" vectors off.
My advice is to go along with the kanji or even slightly ahead. Get couple of words with the same kanji but different vocabs and you will be able to memorize them from approachable angle rather than learning kanji with all onyomi/kunyomi by itself.
Writing wise - get your mind familiar with it through words and sentences. They have to trigger your mind naturally because our brain is usually trying to get away from aggressive pressure and complexity.
